Wanted to touch base, or just leave my two cents on Ryzen equipped HP Models. I left some of this info in the old HP Heroes Group (RIP btw and shoutout to the old crew!) and was asked to share to a broader crowd.

I am not sure how it is in your environment, but in ours, Intel kind of became the defacto go to for CPUs. Not sure if it was the FX series that just put me off for so long, but the i5 kind of became the standard CPU to toss in our units. Sure, i3 or lower could work in some places, and i7 could be a little more beasty, but i5 appeared to be our sweet spot.

Queue pokem0n battle music. (Yeah, I went there.) I wild Intel Shortage appeared! (Okay, will stop there....) Like really Intel, what were you doing?!

Yeah, that was no fun. I am sure some of you may have felt a tad bit more pain over that vs our smaller order sizes. Price hikes on same models, models out of stock, having to buy something with an i7 vs and i5, then i3.... What a hassle, right? When I spoke with my CDW rep about it, he was quoting backorder numbers, and those were already spoken for. Sheesh.

Insert HP Ryzen equipped models. In our case, the Elitedesk 705 mini. We started to move to Prodesk 400 mini's before this, but for the same price as an i5, 256GBish SSD, 8GB, we were able to pick up an Elitedesk with the same specs, aside from the R5 in it. So, made the plunge. (You know, I had followed the good [and bad] reviews, from launch and on, but using them in house for our work machines is another thing. New CPU, new unknowns, ya know?)

Aside from getting a better warranty, the HP Sure suite of security software, and stock availability, the users really could not tell the difference. Arg five what? You a pirate now? Eye five; is that code for something? Meh, it just works. Hey, and at a price the was about the same as what we were already buying, with less in the bundle. I wish I tried them out sooner.

Anyways, my take away is, AMD has stepped up its game and is back in business. Well business business. I know folks still have standard models they stick to, where it is great for troubleshooting and inventory sake, but if you can, give a Ryzen model a chance. In our case, it was really no cost difference, at the time, and the form factor was exactly the same. Can't speak for now with the 3000 series CPU's out (going to assume better performance), but the R5 2000 series models are still rocking it pretty good here.

Final note. No, this is not a paid review, endorsement, or otherwise. I was just asked to share my experience with switching to Ryzen units, to the group. If my experience spurs you to pick up some Ryzen units, all the more power to you. If you don't want to, meh, that is your choice. If there is any questions you might have for me, or if you want to call me a raving lunatic (or both), you know what to do. I hope. Anyways, there you have it.

TL;DR: Snap into a Slim Jim. No. Wait. I got it now! Consider a Ryzen equipped model, as they are trading blows with Intel models these days.

11 Replies

I have had fine results with the R5 Pro 1500 series Ryzen in Elitedesk 705 G3's. Have a half-dozen of them, and they have been plenty good. Our general purpose standard is i5/8GB/256SSD, and the 705's came with 16GB at a slightly better price point (at the time). Performance has been great, the users are happy and have no idea what the backstory is. That's the way I want it.

I've actually got three EliteBook 745 G5's on order today, with LTE radios to add to them. The big price drop after the G6's means some superintendents in the Bay Area are getting touchscreen R7 2700U machines with 16GB of RAM and 512GB NVMe's. They wanted iPad Pro 12.9's to "look at plans" but they're getting real computers with more horsepower for less money - WIN WIN WIN. Plus I'm getting them the Thunderbolt G2 docks, so they'll have a far more productive environment back in the office.

That's not counting the Ryzen 3800X I'm ordering to go into a new admin workstation for someone.......

Nope, 3800X is available and seems the sweet spot for price/performance, I'm replacing a Z240 with an i7-6700 that I overwhelm the CPU on. Should give me some headroom, and I can hand down my Z240 to an estimator and get another three years out of it.

The massive core counts are neat, but my admin workloads are frequently single-core bound when pushing admin scripts or the like out.

I don't see any reason you couldn't go full Threadripper, but that would be for a dedicated rendering machine that my CAD Manager has been agitating for.

Brianinca​ I use an old Xeon E3-1265L V2 (4C8T 2.5Ghz/3.5Ghz Turbo) and Core i5 3470 (4C4T 3.2Ghz/3.6Ghz Turbo). Nothing to fancy, and I normally hack my setup together while deploying out new units to everyone else. I should configure them both correctly so the Xeon is my main driver with the extra threads and the i5 would be an "admin only" machine. Best practices and old habits butt heads sometimes, but right now one is a main daily driver and the other one takes odds and ends that I am working on. When I get around to getting my machine, I might go your route of something higher end, but not full on overkill. We still have budgets and all, but I would like to reduce the physical foot print and move the second one to a VM.

Brianinca​ Side note, have you done anything with EPYC in servers yet? My last HP DL380 was Xeon based, but with how well AMD looks to be doing, I would consider an EPYC based server. Haven't even dug into that front yet (and honestly think that will be a while on that refresh), so would really be interested on the TCO/ROI there.

Alexandru-Iliescu​ Budgets are like mythical creatures. They exist on paper, everyone talks about them, but no one ever sees one. /s I hear ya though. Trying to stretch what you can get, even further. Think AMD is doing a darn swell job at that, and it doesn't help Intel shot themselves in the foot with supply availability issues.

My 2012 Supermicro was a dual Opteron 6274, did sterling service and is still in my DR center as failover compute/storage. Because of many single threaded workloads, I switched to high clock / low core count Xeons for the last two builds, but I will definitely revisit EPYC. My issue may be licensing, I'd have to consolidate my two Datacenter licenses on to one physical server with the core counts I'm seeing. Or buy a lot more licensing I don't really need 8-(

Michael7140hz wrote:

Brianinca​ Side note, have you done anything with EPYC in servers yet? My last HP DL380 was Xeon based, but with how well AMD looks to be doing, I would consider an EPYC based server. Haven't even dug into that front yet (and honestly think that will be a while on that refresh), so would really be interested on the TCO/ROI there.

Alexandru-Iliescu​ Budgets are like mythical creatures. They exist on paper, everyone talks about them, but no one ever sees one. /s I hear ya though. Trying to stretch what you can get, even further. Think AMD is doing a darn swell job at that, and it doesn't help Intel shot themselves in the foot with supply availability issues.

I must say Ryzen has me pretty tempted. They're on the list for when I finally do a new machine for me, I tried AMD back in the K6-2 days, terrible, then I gave them another chance in the Athlon XP days, still terrible, so I've been 100% Intel since and to be fair, I've been happy with them. However, since I consider an i7 the lowest I'll go and the i9 pricing is shocking AMD do have some very tempting offers, so thanks for your feedback.

I'd rather see AMD graphics, I just put an RX 5700 XT in my new Ryzen 7 3800X management workstation. However, the GTX 1660 Ti is a pretty darned good card for the money. Rather see the Omen brand used as well, HP has really made an impact with that series.

Hello Michael and the other members responding, deep appreciation for your post on your first hand experience with HP Ryzen units. It has been a reference point for other members inquiring in the Community and with me behind the scene about the HP Ryzen units. I would add the link you shared in the HP Heroes Group:

And huge thanks for appending to the post by letting us know "HP is putting in a Ryzen CPU in one of their gaming laptops." This was new information. This post was shared with our HP marketing and Spicework teams and was mentioned during our last update meeting.